Moon Over Manifest Chapter 39-41 Summary

Chapter 39

Miss Sadie is finished with her story.
Abilene gets up, takes her compass, and leaves. She walks out to the lonely gravestone in the woods and looks at the name on it.
Gideon Tucker. Her father. Jinx was her father, after all.
She looks at the compass and realizes it's engraved with the date of Ned's death and the place of his burial.
She heads back home to Shady's place and asks him what happened after the telegram came.
He tells her Jinx left. And never came back. Then the flu hit the town for real. The elixir couldn't help, and dozens of people died.
Shady shows Abilene the tombstones, all with names she knows from the story. Even Mrs. Larkin.
Abilene asks for some coffee, so Shady takes her out to the train tracks where the homeless men are.
She realizes that her daddy thought her leg infection was his fault, just like he blamed himself for Ned's death.
And she realizes that he doesn't intend to come back for her. He thinks he's a real jinx.
Shady tells her as much, too, and lets her know that he and Hattie Mae thought it'd be best for her to learn about it all through Miss Sadie's story.

The next day, Abilene goes back Miss Sadie's.
This time, she has the key from the box, and she tries it in the door of the garden shed.
It opens, and she finds a bunch of old jugs and a box full of mementos of a boy named Ned.
Then she goes inside and gets what she needs to lance Miss Sadie's wound.
As she cleans it, they finish the story together…

Miss Sadie wanted a better life for her son, so she immigrated to America.
But when she arrived, she has an eye infection, so she was sent back to Hungary, while her tiny son had to stay.
A friend offered to keep him until she came back.
Miss Sadie gave him a compass to wear around his neck, and said she had another one in her heart, so she'd be able to find him when she came back. (Sniff, sniff.)
When she finally earned enough money to come back, she found that her friend had died, and no one knew where her son, Benedek, was.
Until she found the orphanage that sent him west on an orphan train.
She continued her search, until she finally found her son; but, by then, he had been adopted by the Gillen family, and he was happy. He didn't seem to remember anything about his past.
She didn't want to have him discriminated against like she was there, so she just settled in Manifest to be near him.
She pretended to tell fortunes, but it turns out, she was really just a good observer.
Sister figured out that she's Ned's mother, so she would bring her his schoolwork and report cards.
But now Miss Sadie has to bear the pain of her son's death and the pain of remembering the story for the town.